Automotive Design Culture: Aesthetic Trends Originated in Technology
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F2004U060 AUTOMOTIVE DESIGN CULTURE: AESTHETIC TRENDS ORIGINATED IN TECHNOLOGY Liamadis, George*, Tsinikas, Nikolaos Faculty of Technology, School of Architecture, Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, Greece KEYWORDS - Design, Styling, Trends, Technology, Society ABSTRACT – Ever since the Futurist’s Manifesto, first to see the inner beauty of speed and progress symbolized in the form of early automobile’s mechanical parts, automotive history has often experienced paradigms of technological breakthroughs grown popular to establish aesthetic trends. The car, this highly influential cultural icon of the last century, has often drawn its stylistic inspiration in the product’s technological nature, in the attempt to express visually human’s inherent need for more power, for “better and faster”. Great pipes on early racing cars (1910’s), recalling images of “snakes with explosive breath”, had soon given their place in a new formal language, an aesthetic refinement known as streamlining (1930’s). The expressive force of streamlining, made it synonymous with ‘design’, sculptural intensity and ‘vigorous motion’ even when standing still. It provided an effective visual metaphor for progress, which soon became a formal topos and established an aesthetic trend later extended to a whole series of industrial products, often alien to the idea of motion. Aircraft-referential tailfins on American cars of the 50’s, took automotive styling into the supersonic age, expressing the power of flight and the optimism of the post-war period. The 1973 oil crisis brought up an automotive culture, which shifted the goal from maximization of speed to the optimization of effectiveness. Within this context, streamlining has retained its significance, now justified in terms of ecology and environmental politics. Having managed to split the ultimate goal of the least possible wind resistance from the ‘shape’ in which it appears, modern aerodynamics defined a new formal language, quite different from that of streamlining, but still attached to our inherent tendency in Modernism. Such tendencies have met their formal expression through other engineering achievements as well. Following Ralph Nader’s book “Unsafe at any speed”, stricter laws and the extended research upon passive safety, have turned protection into a major issue in automotive culture. Consumer’s attitude towards safer cars, apart from engineering improvements, has brought about aesthetic changes necessary to serve the subjective ‘feeling’ of safety. Low seating position and protective surrounding interiors, bold and muscular door sections, generous pillar dimensioning, surface development to convey substance and durability, and prevalence of full over empty space, are typical styling features of recent automobiles, modeled to look robust and safe. Further developments in technology of glass, have allowed penetration of light via extended sunroofs, resulting in lower side windows and high waistlines in favour of dynamic and protective body profiles. While, achievements in advanced materials and lighting technology already introduce minor styling cues effecting consumer’s perceptions of progress and modernity. This paper, forming part of an extended PhD research on social issues in car design, aims to research the inner relation between technology and socio-cultural trends and how effects of the former upon the latter are reflected on styling of industrial products such as the car. Study of this complex interaction between engineering achievements, cultural horizon and perception of progress and beauty is crucial for a deep understanding of market trends and an effective design manipulation of contemporary technologies (regarding drive by wire, ITSs and alternative fuels) towards more friendly and desirable automobiles. MAIN SECTION Ever since the Futurist’s Manifesto, first to see the inner beauty of speed and progress symbolized in the form of early automobile’s mechanical parts, automotive history has often experienced paradigms of technological breakthroughs grown popular to establish aesthetic trends. The car, this highly influential cultural icon of the last century, has often drawn its stylistic inspiration in the product’s technological nature, in order to express visually human’s inherent need for more power, for “better and faster”. However, this close relation between engineering and aesthetics – inseparable but still opposite sides of the same coin – has not always been a fruitful love affair; for machine aesthetics have not always been popular among the masses. An in-depth investigation that traces the inner links between machine aesthetics and public taste throughout history is therefore necessary to enlighten this socio-cultural phenomenon of high-tech image consumption. CAR AESTHETICS: HISTORIC STAGES From early hydraulic mechanisms in ancient Greece up to the “machines célibataires” mentioned by Michel Carrouges and the “Colonia Penale” of Franz Kafka – machine, often endowed with almost mystical powers, was treated as the evil to be exorcised. Full of bloodthirsty cogwheels recalling cruel images of torturing devices, it was no surprise that early machines had rather kept their innermost mechanics covered. Only with Leonardo Da Vinci, machine grew bold enough to show off its entrails and later transform them into the main subject in work of engineers such as Rameli or Branca. According to Lewis Mumford(1), during the early industrial era, the mass produced object was still divided in two parts with the first designed to serve mechanical efficiency and the second decorated according to the rules of a totally different kind of art; paradigms of various industrial objects -from locomotives to typewriters- decorated with naturalistic patterns, are the case. This was no other than an art industrially produced and yet ashamed of its very origins. Something quite natural if we consider the time lag that always intervenes between innovation and public acceptance. Morphological innovations deriving from cutting-edge technology are hard to accept by the majority of people, for whom regular cohesion takes the place of active aesthetic assessment. For example, a totally new form, such as the tubular chair of Mies van der Rohe, was rejected by the average consumer of that era, who rather preferred heavy furniture, with ornament in forms of spiral curves and decorative cornices. However, the very same average person was more likely to accept modern aesthetics when no coherence could be made, as for example in the case of early aeroplanes. When the airplane was developed, it was an all-new problem. Its requirements were such that it never occurred to anyone to base its design principles on, for instance, a carriage with wings. On the contrary, designers of the first automobiles were not able to free themselves from the precedent of the horseless carriage or coach, taking much the same view in their work.(2) During the early period of largely utilitarian development of the basic automotive form, not much conscious attention was paid to aesthetics as such. However not few were the pioneers to recognize the beauty of machines themselves. By 1910, the German writer Joseph-August Lux was already suggesting in his book Ingenieur-Aesthetik the beginning of a new era with its distinctive character exclusively taken from machines and its civilization reflected on vehicles and transport engineering(3). While Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti first expressed the brutal excitement of speed and danger aroused by the new machine –the car- in the ‘Futurist Manifesto’ published in Le Figaro on 20 February 1909: “We declare that a new beauty has enriched the splendour of the earth: the beauty of speed. A racing car with his bonnet adorned with giant tubes, serpents of explosive breath… a roaring automobile, which seems to run on grapeshot is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace”(4). The idea that mechanical objects evolve functionally towards an ideal form has fascinated artists and architects since the early 20s. French artist Fernand Léger argued that “in the case of the evolution of the automobile, the more the machine perfects its utilitarian functions, the more beautiful it becomes”, while Buckminster Fuller used to say: “When I am working on a problem I never think about beauty. I only think about how to solve the problem. But when I have finished, if the solution is not beautiful, I know it is wrong”. However popular between theorists, the “form follows function” argument was not necessarily consistent with the mainstream consumer aesthetic trends. Automotive design, which was still bifurcated into mass and craft vehicles at that time, saw the rise of the first stylistic concerns initially applied in the luxury one-off models. Indeed, these craft-made vehicles developed integrated and coordinated shapes produced by a laborious craft process within specialized “carrozzerie”, while mass-produced vehicles developed a disjointed, rectilinear form adjusted to the requirements of the deskilled production process. This growing aesthetic gap testified to the growing class cleavages produced by Fordist mass production(5). When soon the struggles of American workers against the degradations of Fordist production forced up wages and allowed them to construct a world of insulated mass consumption, companies found that in order to sell cars to this growing market, they had to cover the telltale marks of mass production and class differences. Streamlining The attempt to camouflage the tainted factory